The exciting final season! It’s like Attack on Titan but we actually end at four seasons.
The fourth and true final season of the review of the realme note50! What an honor it truly was to hold this phone before we were able to give it away. It was fine while it lasted. But as they say, good things come to an end.
With all of its great audio from creating videos, and its great main camera, does the realme note50 offer anything great with sound? Well… you’ll find out by reading more.
Before we get to the sound, let’s talk batteries, shall we?
CHARGING and BATTERY:
The realme note 50 ships with a 10W power adapter and USB-C charging cable. It comes with a 5000mAh battery inside which is nothing out of the ordinary. Also, when you charge, the notch expands, giving a notification in the style of Apple’s Dynamic Island. Ever since the realme C55 debuted, all phones from the brand had this feature. This dynamic island expands to visually turn the phone into an iPhone 11, and then it contracts back to normal after a few seconds. This notch also notifies you when there is an incoming call.
It’s a nice aesthetic feature to have and does not consume a lot of power or memory. But that aside, how does the phone actually charge? While we were not able to use PCMark to benchmark the battery, we can base it off from our own experiences. The phone, since we purchased one from 1:00 PM, was not charged until the very next day at 6:00 PM, and even then, it still has about 10% battery left! That’s quite the endurance since we were using the phone a lot to take photos and videos during our trip to Baguio.
However, with great power comes long charging times. It takes an abysmal 2-and-a-half hours to charge this thing from empty to full. Just goes to show how slow 10W now is and how massive 5000mAh batteries are. At this day and age, a charging rate of at least 15W should be the norm. Slow, but still faster than 10W.
SPEAKERS/SOUND:
The realme note 50 only has one speaker, located at the bottom but the brand has tweaked it so it has that gimmicky “extra volume mode” which amplifies the sound. The amplification of this one is the smallest among all phones we have tested, only going up to 150% volume. That’s only 50% louder than the loudest natural volume it should be able to handle.
For the sound test, we used Spotify Premium and YouTube. The phone has no native music app (nor a dedicated gallery), instead you use YouTube Music, or download a third-party music app like Poweramp and VLC. It does have the aforementioned two pre-installed however.
The speaker has a pretty shallow sound. When at 100% volume, you can still hear parts of the bass but at 150% this has been removed in favor of better mids. This is not the loudest speaker we’ve heard, but it’s passable, even for casual users. Overall, it sounds pretty cheap, something you could buy at a thrift shop. Not a good sign.
CONCLUSION:
The realme note 50 is such a hidden gem in the sea of budget phones. It looks nothing out of the ordinary outside but inside is great software tuning. Not to mention, we’re still baffled to see that this phone is just PHP 3,599 (4/64) and online, can even be massively slashed to PHP 1,999 with the correct vouchers and by listening to live streams. It’s no wonder why the phone sold out so quickly.
It has a surprisingly great 13MP camera, highly long-lasting battery life, and smooth and snappy software, all for a cheap package. While it does indeed look very similar to the C51, the design works well and makes the phone look more premium. It looks like an iPhone but for the beginners. Can we also mention the software upgrades? 2 years of Android upgrades is realme being very generous. Other phones will be left in the dust at this range.
It’s not perfect in all regards though. For instance, the display is unreadable under direct sunlight, the 5MP selfie leads little to improve quality image. The phone’s lacking in storage is its biggest weakness and you can’t install a lot of games in it. If you play a mainstream game like Mobile Legends, that’s probably the only thing you can put in it, and the MicroSD Card slot is mostly just useful now for storing videos and images.
If you need a phone that can take decent pictures but on a very tight budget, the realme note50 is worth purchasing.
PROS:
- Clean and simple design that looks uniform among realme C-series phones
- Surprisingly amazing 13MP camera. realme’s AI processing enhances image quality greatly
- Bright and clear display
- 90Hz refresh rate when playing select games
- Snappy scrolling and browsing experience
- Simple to understand user interface
- Long-lasting battery
- 2 years of software upgrades and 3 years of security patches
CONS:
- Outdated dewdrop notch when brands like Infinix started using dot notches even on similarly priced phones
- Soft and dull selfies
- 64GB is no longer enough even on casual use
- Speakers output a shallow sound experience. 150% is not very loud against 100%
AVAILABILITY:
The realme note50 is available in Shopee, Lazada, TikTok Shop, realme’s concept stores, and authorized third-party retailers nationwide. It comes in Sky Blue and Midnight Black. It costs PHP 3,599 (4/64) to purchase but with the correct vouchers, it can be purchased for a much more affordable price.
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